


A Hundred Years on Stygian Shores

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, Sam Winchester's Visions, Sea Monsters, Seaside, Temporary Character Death, The Darkness - Freeform, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-06
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-08-19 21:04:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8224748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: On a lonely cape, Sam and Dean Winchester investigate a case they left abandoned years ago. But they don't remember why they abandoned it. In fact, Sam doesn't remember the case at all, and Dean- well, Dean remembers vague, scary things. Like waiting on a boat in the middle of the sea for Sam. Like dark strangers and lights. Like the fact that, maybe, Sam had nearly drowned...





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quickreaver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quickreaver/gifts).



1.

 

This town they’re in is the last on the map before the land opens up into the sea, although there are some farther still, empty towns with witchcraft carved into its ancient histories.  

Last night, half dozing, Sam came up with stories of women cursing fishermen out at sea on their dragger-trawlers; men letting their dogs run free until the creatures grew feral and turned on them. These things happened, sometimes, in forgotten places to forgotten people. 

The Bunker and the landscape that reminded them of the Darkness was a way behind them, and that had made them both go slightly crazy at the same time. Sam propped a bottle of whiskey between his knees, and didn’t descend into melancholia as usual, instead pointing out strange service routes that took them past a bridge with the moon floating in the river beneath them, a graveyard for drifters, and a rocky road where three bobcats were holding parley in the middle before being rudely interrupted by the Impala’s horn. Dean watched him out the corner of his eye, oddly jubilant, wondering how it was that their lives seemed to misalign every so often, grinding and sparking against each other and wearing them both down, before the teeth of its gears fell slotted again, and they were _good_. 

“Real Shakespearian land,” Sam muttered; a soft, stray thought that he didn’t take up further. Dean _hmmed,_ seeing it, old Banquo rising ghostly from fen marshes, witches and cauldron-bubble and the mud-flat river-rot stink of death.  

“Professor Waithe,” spoke Sam again, his eyes closed, passing lights smearing thumbprints of neon against his skin, “and his cry of help to the Bunker. Doesn’t it feel strange to investigate a case based on the word of some random panicky dude on a hundred year old phone?” 

“Hey. _You_ wanted to come here,” said Dean, “I was all right with laying low, learning somethin’ on Amara—” 

“Watching Netflix? Eating tortilla chips for breakfast?” Sam snorted. “Yeah, Dean, we were stewing in there. We found a straw, I wanted to take it.” 

“So quit complaining, Abby.” 

 Sam huffed, impatiently. “But it’s _weird,_ Dean. I looked up this guy, and he has to be a hundred years old now.” 

“What does he teach again?” 

“Paleobiology,” said Sam, taking another sip from the bottle. “It’s the—” 

“I know what it is,” Dean scoffed, rolling his eyes. “We’ve done a case before where we met one of those.” 

“What? A paleobiologist?” 

“Yeah. You don’t remember? Young-ish black guy. Right around here, too. I don’t remember the details, but it was a little after Dad, you know—” 

“Here, in MA?” 

“Yep” 

Sam looked out the window for several minutes, his brow puzzled. “Why don’t I remember—” 

“We had a lot on our plate, man. Your freaky visions, Dad’s death, the yellow-eyed demon…” 

Sam hummed and fell quiet at that, turning his eyes outward again. The roads were deserted. Sometimes they would pass billboards, parts of it resolving itself into a puzzle over low, dark buildings and moist sea-drenched air. Sometimes they would pass churches, and Dean would try to not think of that strange feeling of being stretched thin, pulled taut, this journey taking him farther away from _her_. 

“Well?” 

Dean blinked. “Well, what?” 

 “What were we hunting? Back then, with Mr. Paleobiologist.” 

Dean scowled. “You know what? I don’t remember it that well, either. Maybe we didn’t finish the hunt.” 

Sam’s eyes were huge and glittery from the alcohol. “But we _never_ —” 

“I don’t fucking know, man. We probably got called away. Or something. In fact, yeah, I remember we went straight back to Bobby’s.” 

“To Bobby’s.” 

“Don’t sound so suspicious. We bugged poor Bobby a hell of a lot back then.” 

“Huh.” Sam looked unsettled. “I don’t remember it at all.” 

“Did you hit your head hard one too many times?” Dean teased, trying to ignore the sudden crawl in his skin. “Growing senile on me?” 

“Shut up,” Sam said, shaking his head.  

They drove in silence for a while again, windows down and letting the crisp night air bring with it strays: scraps of paper, the smell of the Merrimack River, the occasional wail of some plaintive night animal. Dean watched landmarks pass on the mirror; house turning as if by alchemy to a geometrical blot, boat to a bobbing speck, each thing reduced immediately into memory once past the rear view mirror. 

Dean worried idly about memory. Sam and Dean didn’t write diaries, didn’t keep track of their hunts the way their Dad had. Sam still scribbled a note or two sometimes, but they were each other’s ready reference. He thought of that winding down, looking to each other for a folder the other couldn’t find, and coming up with dust and a vague reel of images flashing past car windows.  

And maybe one day they’ll stop, stare at each other, and remember nothing more than that they had to keep going, moths drunk on one sunset and seeking another, no other purpose except the purpose of the road. 

Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Not with him and Sam. 

“You really don’t remember,” Dean said, but Sam had fucking dozed off again, head pillowed against the little hump between the seats. The exhaustion of the last year that he’d been carrying on his face—painted lilac around his eyes, gray in the gaunt hollows of his cheeks—seemed softened a little in sleep, and Dean stole a few glances at Sam as he drove, before rolling his eyes at him, irritated by this maudlin mood. 

“You’re useless when you’re drunk,” he said, sliding the GPS out of Sam’s lax grip. They couldn’t be too far from Gloucester now, and even if he remembered nothing else, Dean remembered the fifty-dollar motel out on the town’s main street, and the old restaurant by the harbor. Good chowder; coconut rum. Neither of these things were things you could get by watching Netflix or substituting guacamole for some travesty called _I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter!_ in an underground hideout in good ol’ Kansas. 

Maybe this wouldn’t be a waste of time after all. 

 

2.

 

“Professor Waithe,” says Sam again, now that they’re parked outside a diner that looks out at the harbor. The sky swoons blue over the sea, and an anarchic array of boats bump against each other in the lazy rhythm of an early morning. Dean’s not usually the type to wax poetic about scenic beauty, but here you go. Anyway, the Winchester that usually exalts over nature is divining secrets from the dregs of his coffee cup. “You think it’s the same guy we met then?” 

Dean sighs. “You said you looked him up—that he was probably a hundred years old.” 

“Well, yeah, he served during the World War.” 

“That won’t _make_ him a hundred.” 

“The _first_ World War.” 

Dean gapes. “That makes him fucking _ancient._ Jesus, they let them teach that long?” 

Sam shrugs. “But you said we met a young black man.” 

Dean takes a large bite out of his breakfast roll. “Sam, you’re freaking out about nothing.” 

“I don’t like holes in my memory.” 

“That’s not a hole, Jason Bourne, it’s a goddamn pinprick. Do you remember every vampire nest we ever took down?” 

“No, but—” 

“So maybe it’s just that—a blip of a hunt, before we moved onto something else.” 

“Feels like more,” Sam rubs at the back of his neck. “Like it’s important, and now we’re just going in blind.” 

 “You were the one who wanted to get out of Kansas, dude,” Dean says, “Don’t tell me you’re flaking out on the promise of a beach.” 

“Not exactly the kinda beach that inspires, is it?” 

“Hey, don’t diss the beach,” growls Dean, “Shut up and eat your—whatever _that_ is.” 

Sam doesn’t, though. In typical Sam fashion, he peers at his laptop instead, shuffling through pictures of old academicians and a large granite building with imposing gambrels and widow’s walks looking out over the sea. Dean remembers that place. Like a cathedral, so quiet and infused with a strange sort of holiness. Or maybe _un-holiness_ ; it was quite hard to tell between the two. The hush, the cold, the unearthliness were all the same. You’d just have to wait and be surprised at what it is that taps at your shoulder.  

The school is farther from the town than they expect. It looks over granite quarries and old moraine paths, and the wind assaults them as they cross the quadrangles to pass into the hallowed halls of higher education.  

It is as Dean remembers: the students are a quiet few, the silence is heavy. From the way Sam’s face falls into lines of alarm, he thinks he is not the only one who notices it. 

“It’s like a freaking graveyard.” 

“Maybe it’s term break,” says Sam, “This isn’t a very large school anyway.” 

Sam and Dean are not pretending to be anything today. Professor Waithe had called the Men of Letters for help: he knew what they were. Sam knocks on a door marked with a plaque— _Howard Waithe—_ and smiles absently at Dean as they wait. He’s in a good mood—God knows what brought _that_ on, probably the waitress from one of their recent cases. What was her name? Pepper? Piper? Sounded like a jailbait name. 

“Hello, Professor. We’re Sam and Dean Winchester,” says Sam, as the door opens. 

Dean’s breath catches for a second in his throat. It’s _him,_ he thinks, the same guy they’d met back then. Easily six feet, dark-skinned, pleasant and soft-voiced. 

“Hullo,” he says, shaking Sam’s hand, “Thanks for coming. Again.” 

Sam opens his mouth as if to say something, but settles for just following Waithe into his office instead. Waithe does preliminary stuff that lets him check the boxes of hospitality. _Great weather to be here; fierce dogs aren’t around anymore; I’ve arranged a stay for you boys with the old cabin by the beach._ Dean hums along, but Sam’s not paying attention. Sam’s gaze roves the office walls: the mahogany fixtures, the wainscoting, and the pictures in the frames. A deep frown moves to settle on his face.  

“Honestly, boys,” Waithe says, adjusting his glasses on his nose, “I wasn’t sure you two would come, after last time.” 

 When Sam continues to admire the paintings, Dean speaks instead.   

“It’s no biggie,” he says. “What’s the problem, again?” 

“Same as the last time, I’m afraid, boys. A little worse this time: it feeds on more and more people every month, and we’ve had a few townspeople dream of it coming out of the water.” 

Sam exchanges a glance with Dean, alarmed.  

 _The last time. What the fuck was it the last time?_  

Fortunately, Sam whips out a Dictaphone. “Professor. If you don’t mind, for the sake of our archives—could you elaborate?” 

When Waithe tells the story, Dean remembers a bit of it. Yes, there’d been a beach. Dead people on the beach, weird patterns on their skin, and strange lights at night over the sea, hanging solitary. He remembers fixing up a broken motor-boat. He and Sam had rented diving equipment. Dean remembers the cold rush of water hitting his skin when they’d dived in. The murky blues of the sea beneath. 

They’d felt, at night, an intense sort of loneliness, knowing the nearest town was several miles away, and that there was no one here for company save the couple on the ground floor of their cabin who they never saw.  

They’d played Monopoly. 

It’s the weirdest thing: remembering all this ephemera, this surface dressing of the last time they’d worked this same case. Remembering the blue of the water and the weird glowy underwater fauna, but not the actual monster they’d come to hunt. Having a memory for the smug grin on Sam’s face when he won the stupid game, but no memory for the reason why they’d left, case unfinished.  

“—and then one of you called me one night. You said you were leaving.” 

Sam leans forward in his chair. “Did we tell you why?” 

Waithe looks embarrassed. “The same reason why everyone who comes to help this town leave.” 

“Professor,” says Sam, quietly. “For the sake of witness accounts—” 

“Oh. Well,” says Waithe, removing his glasses now, rubbing them fiercely on his old-fashioned waistcoat. “One of you saw it.” 

“Saw—what?” 

Waithe swallows, looking from one of them to the other, uncomfortably.  

“Death,” he says. 

 

3.

 

“So—what? It could be like a possession, sort of thing?” 

“Might explain why we don’t remember anything. You—uh, you have memory gaps from the time…” 

Sam inhales, sharply. “The angel was in me. Yes.” 

Dean considers it, the idea that one—or the both—of them had been something _other_ , the last time they had been here. That they hadn’t known, nor remembered later, whatever it was that had crawled into their brains. Demons, angels, Khan worms—there were many things that could make your body its home. That could make you jerk like a puppet on a string. 

Somehow, he thinks of Amara again. Amara, who grew from baby to child in the blink of an eye, who must have grown into a woman by now. Amara, with the strange thrall of power over him that he tries hard not to think about, and harder still not to let Sam know what he thought about. 

“Hey, Dean,” says Sam, stirring the soup with a frown on his face. “Do you remember staying here?” 

The kitchen in the cabin is warm and rustic, quite unlike the hostile coast right outside. It’s a stretch to call this place a _cabin,_ though—it has two floors, a basement that can house boats, and a private road to the beach. Outside, the granite cliffs are arranged in a strange shape, sort of like an apostrophe. The sea isn’t visible from the kitchen: the views are from the bedroom, and Dean wishes it weren’t. There’s something strange about this beach, something not quite right. He and Sam can’t put their finger on it. They just agree that it unsettles them, draw curtains against the windows, and leave it at that. 

 _It’s a graveyard, not a beach,_ Professor Waithe had said. _People—things—come here to die._  

Walking across the beach earlier, Sam and Dean hadn’t found anything particularly morbid. There were rocks, and rock pools with tiny red crabs in them. They had found a couple of strangely marked shells, arranged in patterns in a couple of places. The water had washed over them in an alternate wave cadence, which was a little spooky, as though whoever had put it there had precisely measured how the ebb and the tide of the water would lick at the stones. Sam couldn’t figure out what the markings were, or even if it resembled any language known to man.  

The house had featured shells of the same marking buried in the sand, leading all the way to the door. There were grooves, carved into them, _one-two, one-two-three_ like some sort of semaphore code, or like veins. 

The entire time they’d been out, though, Dean had felt watched. More than one pair of eyes followed their movements. More than one pair of eyes stalked them quietly in this deserted beach. 

“I’ve never seen it before,” says Sam now, looking around at the kitchen, worry still gnawing at the edges of his eyes, “This house. And I mean it. Not even a speck of déjà vu.”  

“It…looks familiar to me,” shrugs Dean. “But, hey, that don’t necessarily mean jack. Every motel with a Tiki theme looks familiar to me, whether it’s in Texas or Montana.” 

“Let’s go over this once,” says Sam, turning around to lean against the kitchen counter, “You and I came here, on the back of a newspaper clipping about ritualistic deaths in this beach. We met Professor Waithe, we did some research, we tried to figure out what was going on—and then something happened. And we left. Waithe thinks one of us tried to—um, kill ourselves. You remember anything else?” 

“I remember a storm,” Dean says, hesitantly. It had come to him when they’d walked along the beach today: the crack of thunder, lightning, rain so thick he could barely see a thing. “I remember waiting.” 

“For what?” 

“I don’t know. I remember being on a boat, waiting, that’s all. Wasn’t fucking _nice_ enough that I’d care to remember more of that.” 

“Where was I?” 

“I don’t know, man,” says Dean. “You weren’t with me. I can’t remember it.” 

Sam nods, and looks back at the bubbling soup. “There’s something else that’s weird. The people who died… there are no obituaries. No records of driving licenses, no credit card trails. It’s as if they didn’t exist.” 

“We saw a body, though.” 

“Sure we did. Lila Waters. Her family stays in Rockport. Only, they _don’t_ , according to records.” 

“Dodgy,” Dean agrees. “But Sam, we gotta treat this one like any other case, man. If we start getting paranoid about this—” 

“Yeah, I know. People can’t keep dying here.” 

Sam doesn’t look so sure. But _saving people_ is a drum he keeps beating on, so he sets his jaw and goes back to his soup. 

Dean returns to studying one of the shells. What could they mean? Whoever had planted it, he wonders what strange magic they hope to wreak.  

There’s a thump from above them, and Dean looks up at the slats on the ceiling. Professor Waithe hadn’t mentioned anyone staying above them, but the caretaker had hinted at a couple, scholarly-type, here to study something. “It’s kinda weird, huh? We’ve been out all day, and we never ran into them at the beach. You’d think if they had come all the way out here…” 

“We could go up,” Sam suggests, “Say hello. I’d rest a little easier knowing who it is in this house with us.” 

“Paranoid much, Sammy?” Dean grins. “They’re probably debt-broke student honeymooners. Probably just stay up there and screw all day long.” 

Sam makes a face. “Anyway,” he says, ladling the soup into bowls. “The university is showing a documentary on the tribes and clans that used to live in this place tomorrow. Algonquian history, among other stuff. I was thinking I’d go, check it out, see if I learn something about all this.” 

“Knock yourself out; I’m gonna go out to that lookout post we saw today.” 

“Keep a look out for those stones. We might be on to something there. And Dean?” 

“What?” 

“Are there squid boats in this area?” 

“Beats me. Why?” 

“A memory,” Sam says, hesitantly. “Maybe.” 

Lights, bobbing in the sea. _Beneath_ the sea—flickers of it showing through waves, loud shouts. Had they watched it from afar? Everything was vague in the memory, hazy like looking through a storm.  

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Maybe.” 


	2. Two

4.

 

Dean takes the beach at a leisurely pace the next day.  

It’s cold; the wind that blows in is salty and deafening, and he draws in, pulling his jacket collar up around his chin. He carries a flashlight—things get misty around here, and _fast_ —and a packet of rough-cut meat for the dogs. That’s courtesy of Sam, who’d insisted that the dogs are feral around here, wild, bleached of all the stains of domestication. He also carries his gun, obviously, but he’s not going to shoot a freaking _dog_. 

This place is desolate and lonely. Quiet beaches often are, Dean’s noticed, the world of land and sea commingling to create something that doesn’t truly belong to either. The surf crashes against rocks, whirpools in little nooks. After a while, Dean gives up on the experience of having his shoes sink deep into sticky sand, and takes the beach on barefoot instead. He talks to Cas, who is still on a Netflix-bender, and marvels at this weird quiet between one mess-up and another. And then Sam calls, to let him know that he’s picking up lunch from town after his documentary flick. 

Something about this case leaves a bad taste in his mouth. He thinks back and there’s water and fear and loss in his memory. He’d been waiting not just for _something_ like he’d told Sam. In the middle of the sea, in that storm, he’d been waiting _for_ Sam.  

Sam, who’d seen a monster under there and was trying to take an underwater torch to it. They’d flipped a coin, and Dean had had to stay on the boat with the gas canisters for the oxy-acetylene, while Sam went to find the monster. And Sam had— 

Something. When he tried to remember anything after that, there was only fog, and them showing up slightly shell-shocked at Bobby’s. Maybe Bobby would have known this story better. 

The bottom of the derelict old lookout is strewn with rocks, and water pools in muddy cracks, full of silver fishes darting. Dean climbs the stairs and steps into the room at the top, peers at the blue sea peeking through the wooden slats of the walls. The floor is half-rotted, pieces of wood still attached to some of the metal strips making up the base. He steps carefully, until he reaches the edge of the wall, to where he can see everything: the beach, the sea, the cabin that he and Sam are staying in. There are two men on the far side of the beach, leaning over something. Probably their upstairs neighbors: they carry notebooks and pens, and what looks from afar like some sort of blocky equipment to read the sand. The fog obscures them quickly, and Dean turns his attention elsewhere.  

Behind the lookout, he notices, is a road that leads around the face of a cliff. It is not visible from elsewhere. Squinting, Dean can make out smoke rising from the other side. A building, maybe? Just on the corner, hidden from view. 

A church—he realizes, when he climbs down and turns the bend. Although the steeple is half broken, and the wood is salt-bleached to a worn white pallor. Inside, the silence is heavy. 

He calls out, but is answered with nothing but the drip of damp from somewhere he can’t see, and the scuttling of rats worried into motion by the sound of his shoes and his voice. The altar has been torn down, he notices, and something else erected in its place. A sheet of some smooth mineral, marked with the same glyphs as those on the shells. It shines, nacreous, the way insect carapaces do.  

“Cults,” he mutters, noticing strange offerings at the bottom of the tablet. Bowls of sand, varicolored, probably collected from multiple states and multiple beaches. Seashells. There are some scrolls, with some of the words visible: _the world began from Nothing and will end in Nothing_. Dean unrolls another and finds it written in an almost unintelligible hand. _All the First Born will rise at the Call._  

He clicks a picture with his phone—Sam’s gonna want to see this immediately, and he’d rather Sam sees it from the safety of the cabin than brave the fog later on in the evening—and then he reaches out to touch it. 

Something…happens. It’s not immediately perceptible: a feeling, a sick miasma in the air that wasn’t there before, a thrum of energy crackling beneath his skin. He turns, suddenly sure of eyes on him, and catches the hint of a person disappearing past the edge of the door.  

“Hey!” he yells. “Stop!” 

There’s no one outside by the time he gets there, but everything has gone dark. The sea spits froth in the distance like a mad beast. The sun’s gone, not just hidden beneath the clouds: _gone_. A wave of icy air hits him and nearly forces him back into the odd little church. 

Someone stands at the waterline. A man. No—not _any_ man, it’s _himself._ Like a mirror image, only different somehow, taller, something about his posture more relaxed, surer.  

Dean reaches for his gun, almost as if he’s been planning for this moment, planning to take down this stranger who is him or will be. 

 His hand doesn’t even shake. 

And then there’s a sharp pain in his head, the ringing that comes from a heavy blow, and darkness. 

 

5.

 

The documentary, Sam decides, had been unsettling to say the least. He’d watched grey water slap against grey sand, the soundtrack the primal sound of waves and cicadas and strange nocturnal animal noises. The voice-over had spoken about how people had always feared the night—the coming of the dark, that strange time when the lines of reality could be blurred into something fierce and un-godly. Nearly every theology and every mythology in the world underlined two constants: the Great Flood, and the End of Times. End the world however you want, said the documentary, in fire or ice or plagues of locusts: the world, at the end of its destruction, belongs to the Eternal Night.  

The Darkness. 

In this coast, there was a boulder a little out in the sea. It has been there, said the voice-over, for centuries. It has been worshipped several times over the centuries, by several different types of people. In times before settlers had made landfall in what would later be called the Massachusetts Bay Colony, there had been people here, worshipping this God-Unknown who had his lair in the sea. In later times, there had been sightings of sea monsters, creatures of the deep dark, cousins of the legendary Leviathan. They wouldn’t walk in a world that still had the sun—they would wait, for that Eternal Night. 

Sam might be over-analyzing the doom-and-gloom tone of the myths itself, because most of the _actual_ content was on anthropological findings, students’ work in determining ancient hieroglyphic languages lost to man, and how the myths later fed into the area’s sea-faring, witchcraft peppered history. He’d found himself wondering in between if the narrator was, in reality, an actual angel. He’s got flummox-marks around the eyes, which could be indicative of the early days when his vessel walked around being constantly surprised by diapers or ducks or cartoon porn. 

Still, Sam couldn’t help correlating things in his mind. This fight against this adversary they knew nothing about, this Darkness, and how fear of her had played a major part in the formation of so many belief systems. Could this really be connected to her? Would her presence on Earth wake things up that had been sleeping so long? 

But it didn’t make sense. They’d been here before; worked the same case. The Darkness hadn’t been around then, and people had still died. 

He squints at the sunlight when he walks out of the audio-visual room at the university, thumbing his phone near-blind in search of Dean’s number. He would call ahead to let Dean know he was heading back; they could finish up with lunch and get down to figuring out how to check out this boulder. 

He walks towards where the Impala’s parked, and slowly becomes aware of eyes on him. He slows, and sweeps his gaze across the quadrangle. Not _one_ pair of eyes—multiple. The girl under the façade of the Science building is leaning against a wall, staring right at him. There are faces hidden in the shadows of the upper floors of the buildings, watching from shadowed corners.  

A slow chill works its way up his spine.  

This is strange. This must be—what? At least twenty people, just waiting and watching.  

Sam pushes his hands into his jeans’ pockets, slouching, making himself look non-dangerous. The weight of his gun at the waistband of his jeans is a comforting thing, and he knows he’ll be able to make it out of here if someone jumps him. The Impala is right here, five steps away. He just doesn’t want to get into a fight—things are strange enough with this case as it is. 

And then a man steps out from around the Impala. 

“Mr. Winchester,” says the man, in a bored voice. “I’m Deputy Jake Wilson, from the police department. We’d like to speak with you.” 

Sam smiles, puzzled. “Can I ask what it’s about?” 

Wilson’s watery blue eyes alight on Sam for a minute before drifting away. “You’re not in trouble or anything. We just wanted to know why you’re back here.” 

The lie comes easily. “Oh! Yes, my brother and I, we’re doing some research. Marine life. We’re just here to gather some data.” 

The wind whispers. Sam has a vague feeling that the people watching him do too, exchanging whatever strange tidbits of information they were gleaning from this conversation. 

Wilson raises an eyebrow. He’s a particularly unpleasant looking guy, Sam thinks suddenly. He smells strongly of wintergreen and mothballs, an old-man smell, and his thin face is strangely familiar: maybe they’d met him the last time they had been here. The time Sam doesn’t remember. He hates this shutter over his memory. All he can make out is vague impressions: a boat a-lit with swinging lamps, dark water, and fire. He’d been annoyed at Dean for some reason, and angry: they’d tossed coins for something and Sam had rigged it in his favor. 

Wilson doesn’t believe Sam’s lie. He can see it in the man’s eyes. “Last time this _research_ nearly killed you, didn’t it, Sam?” 

“I’m sorry, I don’t—” 

“Oh, you’re probably thinking, who’s this lunatic, what does he want—,” Wilson drones, “But let _me_ tell you this. Last time, this place really did a number on you, didn’t it?” 

 _Last time._ Last time is fog, drenched up from memories now buried under layers of other memories. Last time is the taste of salt, a vague sense of unease, water closing over his head. 

“Mr. Wilson, whatever you think we’re here for—” 

Wilson blinks, owlishly. “Oh, we know why you’re here. We just don’t know why you came back.” 

Sam keeps his tone light. “We’re somewhat a bit of risk-takers, Dean and I. You know—no pain, no gain. In fact, there’s a lot of pain for little gain in what we do, but the job sort of needs to be done.” 

“Last time things didn’t go well at all,” says Wilson, jabbing a finger in Sam’s direction. It shakes like an old man’s atrophying digits, in contrary to Wilson’s somewhat youthful appearance, “We didn’t expect you to come back.” 

“ _We?_ ” 

“Last time,” Wilson says, stepping closer to him, “it let you go, because you were _kids_ who didn’t know what they were dealing with. It won’t be as kind this time.” 

 _It,_ Sam thinks, noticing the change. There’s something here that’s beyond these townspeople, even. 

“What are we dealing with according to _you_ , Deputy?” 

Wilson doesn’t miss a beat. “Things way bigger than all of us.” 

“That’s kind of our specialty,” Sam says, levelly. “If you know who we really are, and what we’re doing here, you’d let us do our job, Mr. Wilson. For your own sake.” 

Wilson kills his fake smile. “Waithe is a _fool._ And you’re fools for coming here and thinking you can help us. No one has helped us in centuries. No one _could_. You’ll stir things up, and then you’ll leave, and we’ll be here to take the brunt, as always, would you _like_ that?” 

“We’re not here to stir anything up,” Sam says, in what he hopes is a reasonable voice, “With any luck, we’re here to end this…whatever is happening here.” 

“What do you _think_ is happening here?” 

“Something terrible,” says Sam. “I know you’re scared. I’ve spoken to Professor Waithe, and he tells me that the thing that lives in the sea comes into your dreams, shows you things—” 

Wilson pales. “Shut _up_. Don’t talk about it.” 

“You don’t have to worship it. It’s not a God, it’s just a piece of shit monster that we’ll deal with—” 

Wilson lunges at him, suddenly. “Is that why your brother is messing around in our church?” he yells, and Sam takes an involuntary step backward, dodging the man’s fist. “We caught him, you know, looking through our things.” 

Sam feels a sudden chill. “What church?” 

Wilson grins, a flash of derangement crossing his face. “We hope his head doesn’t hurt too much.” 

“Get out of my way.” 

Wilson mock-bows, and steps away.  

Sam dials Dean’s number, with no luck. By the time he takes the last road at a squealing, screaming-brakes pace, he’s quietly sure that Wilson hadn’t just been saying things to freak him out. He takes the twisting, derelict paths to the beach at as fast a run as he can without falling off the slopes, and by the time the cabin comes back into view, he’s gulping in huge, terrified breaths. 

Too many times. The last few years, they’ve lost each other too many times in too many different ways for any hint of trouble to be less than terrifying now. 

“Dean?!” he yells, finding the door open, but no sign of Dean anywhere in the front room. Out on the beach, there are two men standing at a distance, talking quietly, and Sam yells at them, waving, _have you seen my brother?_ One of them turns to look towards the cabin and Sam hesitates—something, _something_ about him isn’t right. He stumbles back inside, and almost runs smack straight into Dean. The breath goes right out of him. “Dude, what the hell!” 

 “Sam. Why’re you screaming?” Dean blinks blearily, rubbing at his head. “What the fuck happened?” 

“You—look like crap. Shit,” Sam says, running a hand through his hair in aggravation. Dean does the same and winces. “You don’t remember anything?  The deputy of Silent Hill told me they’d found you in a church or something—” 

Dean’s eyes grow wide. “Someone knocked me out!” 

Sam grabs Dean’s shoulder, afraid he’s gonna pitch over with that look on his face. “Do you—are you seeing things right? Do you think we should—” 

“How the hell did I get back here? Did they bring me back here after knocking me out? Are they fucking insane!” 

“I don’t know,” Sam sighs. “Maybe you should sit down, let me take a look at where they hit you. You remember everything?” 

“Their creepy church and lunatic religion? Yeah, you bet!” Dean says, furious. He tries to go out the door and Sam blocks him. Dean gives him a distracted, ineffective shove, “They snuck up on me, the bastards.” 

“Okay—Dean, seriously—” 

“I think you can rule out a concussion—stop pawing at me, Sam!” 

“I would if you stopped acting like you want to bolt out there and shoot them all.” 

“No bolting, I swear. My God, _Florence_.” 

Sam roots through the cooler for an ice pack while Dean sits down and swears and tells his story. He stops suddenly after the point where he’d touched the stone and seen the world gone dark, and Sam turns to look at him, sharply. 

“What did you see?” 

Dean looks out through the grainy window, thoughtfully. “I don’t know. I thought I saw me.” 

“What?” 

Dean waves an arm. “Me. I saw myself. Standing by the water.” 

“Huh.” 

“But it wasn’t… _me_. It was something different, Sam. Something was _strange_ about it. Like maybe it was..something bad.” 

Sam passes him the ice. “Do you mean, like a monster wearing your face? Or were _you_ the monster?” 

Dean gives him a stricken look. Sam shrugs, pulling a chair up to sit on it the wrong way around.  

“Well,” says Dean, “I wanted to shoot it, whatever it was. Isn’t that strange? I see something that looks just like me, and all I want to do is end it, no questions asked. I mean, you wouldn’t do that.” 

Dean’s still sloughing off the effects of the Mark. Sam doesn’t need him to say it; he sees it in the way Dean acts around people, throwing more of the reins of social interaction to Sam, who hasn’t taken them in years. There’s a part of Dean that will never change—and Sam’s glad for that, wouldn’t know his bearings without that—but there’s a part that now looks too deep within himself, trying to find the source of the rot.  

Sam can see that; he spent most of his life doing the same thing after all. This is _his_ narrative, has been for years, and Dean had dealt with it mostly through denial.  

Sam tries, instead, to be honest. 

They’ve walked the line between good and evil too many times now for them to feel comfortable even talking to this other self, this version glimpsed if only through a glass, darkly. He thinks of the man at the beach, turning to look in his direction, and that split-second moment of terror when he thought it had been himself. Sam, standing by the beach, turning to look at Sam, in the cabin. Would he have shot at the man if he hadn’t been worried about Dean? 

 “I probably would,” Sam says. “Every time I’ve been something else, it felt like a violation. Like it deserved death.” 

“But not me, not when I tried to barter your life, with Death back there,” Dean asks, sharply, “You seemed sure I could be good again, you _told_ me—” 

“You were still _you_. You were fighting. You had a choice.”  

 _You could see what was right and wrong._ Sam still didn’t know if he could. Would he have released the Darkness to save Dean from the Mark of Cain, knowing he was dooming the world? Probably not. But there was no way to really know, because things hadn’t worked like that, and they would always put each other first in the face of muddy consequences. Maybe they could change. Maybe it was too late. 

“I have news,” he says, to stop his brain from following this train of thought. “The ones who that church belongs to—same good citizens who just hit you over the head with a plank— want us to get out of here, thinks we’re the pesky Mystery Inc kids here to break up their nice little cult.” 

“Cute. What else is new?” 

“Um. We might need a boat. There was something interesting in the documentary.” 

“Waithe can give us a boat.” 

“Yeah, I’m gonna call him now.” 

“Do you think,” Dean says, slowly, “that this case has something to do with her?” 

“Her, who?” 

“Amara.” 

“What makes you think that?” 

“That monster wants to walk in a world of Darkness. The church talks about a world _steeped in the dark._ Just a hunch.” 

Sam purses his lips, thinking of earlier, when he’d told himself that he had to be over-reacting. This could be any monster living in the shadows, not necessarily the shadows themselves. This place has been under this creature’s thralls for centuries, if Wilson was to be believed. The Darkness had been locked up for centuries, so didn’t that rule her out? Although, said a little voice in his head, the Devil had been locked up for centuries as well. And that hadn’t meant that he didn’t have lackeys listening and following his whispered orders, all that time. 

“I don’t know,” says Sam, honestly. “I have a feeling it does.” 

 

6.

 

The water is all around Sam, an incessant, murky, colorless wash. He pushes his tongue against the breathing tube, blocking it, holding his breath in until his head is underwater, and the headlamp cuts through the marine snow to let him make out shapes. He blows out through the tube, searching all the while, hallucinating ghosts drifting under the sea.  

Underneath, it’s quiet. He has found this coast a terrible, hellish place—given to foraging, hungry dogs and imposing cliffs, choppy waters, and skies that sometimes were colorless and sometimes crimson, dead and carnivorous at the same time. They’re far away from other people, and at night all this open space feels like it will crush Sam to the ground, shatter him with its impossible hugeness.  

This case grates at them. It doesn’t make sense. The church with the strange beliefs of some creature that walks in a dark world; the victims that have no marks on them except a strange pattern, like the coils of a snake. The longer they stay the worse their tempers run, and Sam is running out of things to research. Something is wrong, he keeps thinking, something is wrong with the two strangers he sometimes sees on the beach, something is wrong with the church, something is wrong with the people who have died here.  

He swims farther out, slowly, focusing on his breathing, unsettled by the rattle of the regulator. The sea floor is un-littered, fish darting in and out of Sam’s field of vision. He twists in all directions, looking for something, and that’s when he sees the ink. 

Dim, sinuous creatures flash and dart through the depths, following a stream of thick black. He follows it, and now the murkiness of the sea gives away to a greenish hue, as though the sun is shining in, haloing the waters an otherworldly color. The sea creatures that swim frantically to the source of the ink are not jellyfish, but something alike—translucent, bodies stained with the black in places, and Sam makes a mental note to look them up later.  

For now, he follows the tendrils of dark. 

He finds the boulder that it originates from easily enough. It’s enormous, lying at a point where the ocean floor drops sharply off to greater, dizzier depths. He’s probably come too far in, already, Sam realizes, suddenly light-headed at the thought of all this deep water that still claims hundreds of seasoned fishermen every year. 

But the ink. It leaks out from beneath the boulder, and Sam wonders, oddly calm whether _if_ , if it is biological, it’s a thing of botany or zoology. He would rather the former, although when the boulder moves, and something slithers out, he knows instinctively that it’s the latter. 

The black thing slides over the ocean floor, snake-like. It doesn’t look like a tentacle any more than it looks like gemstones, and Sam can’t truly describe it, this thing that’s lain here for how many ever centuries, waiting for some day to come, some invitation to arrive so it may roam free. Asking for sacrifices; showing some townspeople visions of a dark world; leaching the life out of three entire towns that had previously tried to settle here, closest to the Atlantic that they may live off the ocean.  

It seems to notice him. 

He doesn’t even get a chance to try escaping before it strikes out, quick as lightning, to yank him down.  

Water floods his mouth. 

It goes up his nose and down his throat, and it burns. He tries to kick up to surface, the sky above clear blue and the water now like glass, _newest_ glass before there are even fingerprints on it.  He kicks, gets dragged sideways, and is yanked down fighting against gravity. And then he hits bottom.  

Air rushes from his mouth, his nostrils, and floats thirstily up towards the surface. 

 _No._  

The monster pins him down, and where its strange limb wraps around his skin, he sees blood bloom. Everything warps, and then he’s not looking at the monster anymore. 

He’s looking at _Dean_. Only, it’s not _Dean_ , not really—his eyes are black and there’s something _wrong_ with him, something— 

And there’s a strange trilling sound, loud now, a rushing in his ears and a high, shrill sound like nothing he’s ever heard—and he sees things, terrible things—fire, and Hell, and his own eyes going black— 

 _Sam,_ Dean’s yelling. _SAM. Sam, Christ, wake up. Breathe, goddammit, SAM!_  

 _But that’s from long ago,_ Sam thinks. All this—from so long ago. 

Something thumps against his back, pressure against his chest, and he comes to, coughing and gasping, on his back in the floor of what looks like the bathroom in the cabin. 

“What was _that?_ ” Dean demands. He looks scared, which is so strange. His hands are all over, checking Sam for injuries, and Sam starts a little when he realizes that he’s drenched.  

“Hey,” says Dean, grabbing his face now to force Sam to look at him,“Hey, man, you okay?” 

“Y-yeah, yeah. I’m fine.” 

Dean barks a frightened little laugh. He’s got one arm around Sam, his hold tight. “That was _not_ good. That was crazy.” 

Sam coughs again, a little more water trickling out of his mouth. Dean slaps his back, again.  

“Goddamn it, Sam, don’t do that to me.” 

“What—what happened?” 

“I don’t know!” Dean says, pulling Sam up so they sit, side by side, dripping saltwater and—in Sam’s case—racked with shivers. “I woke up and couldn’t find you, and the door was open so I thought you were in here, only you took forever. You weren’t responding to my call—” 

And so Dean had come in, only this looked nothing like the room he knew. For one, there was water, as high as the ceiling or even beyond. Tinged the same murky colors of the sea outside, and self-contained, not spilling into the rest of the house and not swallowing him whole.   

“Did you see the monster? Did you see—” 

 _You,_ Sam doesn’t want to say. It looked like _you._  

Dean frowns. “I just saw you. You were drowning. You were off the floor, you were drifting—it was weird as fuck, Sam.” 

“And the water?” 

Dean shrugs. “I don’t know. I was sort of freaking out about _you_.” 

“I don’t think it was just a dream—” starts Sam, and Dean nods quickly. “It’s happened before, hasn’t it?” 

“Last time,” he says. “I remembered. You disappeared underwater when we were looking for the lair. I had to drag you out. And you said you saw the monster—you said you saw _things_.” 

“The future. _My_ future, that is,” Sam laughs, shakily. “Hellfire, the demon blood, Lucifer—” 

Dean’s quiet for a minute. “You didn’t tell me that the last time.” 

Sam snorts, and wipes water out of his eyes. “I think that was a singularly bad time for me to even consider that I could become any of those things.” 

They stare at each other a minute, and Sam wants, very badly, to just disappear into the floor all of a sudden. 

“You’re more than those things, Sammy,” Dean says, softly.  

“We wanted to torch the lair, didn’t we?” Sam says, quickly. “We took an acetylene torch down there the next time, and everything.” 

“Yes. You were pretty adamant about smoking the shit out of that thing, once you came outta there. We went the very next day.” 

“And?” 

“You cheated on me with a biased coin, I remember _that_ ,” he sighs. "We didn’t get the monster, Sam. You got pretty freaked out by it—I was supposed to give you thirty minutes before I tried my turn, but I kinda had to drag you out, twenty minutes in.” 

Sam shakes his head. What had he seen under there, that they’d left the job without trying again? 

“Well, shit.”  

“What?” 

“Obviously, that plan didn’t work. Sounded like a good plan, though.” 

“Burn everything? Sounds like my kinda plan.” Dean pats Sam’s shoulder, and climbs to his feet. “Give it time. We’ll figure out something. We always do. I’m going to put on some coffee, man, not gonna get any sleep after _that_.”  

Sam stares at the puddles of seawater, all around him, and shivers. 


	3. Three

7.

 

Sam’s got a table full of paper clippings, research notes, and his laptop whirring by the time Dean finishes with the coffee. It’s still dark outside, and quiet, and there’s a tremble inside of Dean that’s been there since the ceiling-high water in the bathroom dissipated and Sam had fallen to the floor in a tangled, suffocating heap. He’d coughed up so much fucking water before he even swam into consciousness. And how far was this place from a hospital? From the car? 

Maybe this is why they’d left. This pressure of being alone, away, tucked into some godforsaken corner of the world where the only things that existed were crazy ocean cults and rabid dogs and the motherfucking Creature of the Blue Lagoon. 

“You find anything?” he asks, more as a throwaway than an actual question, setting a coffee mug in front of Sam.  

“Maybe,” Sam mumbles. “But it makes no _sense._ I’ve just looked at the victim profiles again. You remember Michael O’Keefe? He’s the one who had died around the time we came here last time. This is O’Keefe, at the St. Peter’s feast in Gloucester the year he moved to Massachusetts.” 

Sam points to a man, holding a giant fishing-boat oar, a beaming smile on his round face. 

“And _this_ , the girl standing left to him, is—” 

“Lila Waters. Who died two weeks ago.” 

“Yes. But Dean, Lila Waters cannot be more than thirty. This photo was taken in 1992. She would have been a kid then.”  

“Maybe a sister?” 

“No, the caption mentions her by name. This local paper is the only thing that even mentions any of these people—like I told you, they have no paper trails. Anywhere.” 

“So, what? Lila Waters was immortal?” 

“I don’t know. But look at this. I dug up a photo of the school—where Waithe works—from a forum on the internet trading vintage photographs. This was taken on the day the foundation stone was laid. Look at this guy.” 

“That’s Waithe. And does he look like he’s always looked, even in 1958.” 

Sam nods. “Something freaky is going on here. Earlier when I met the Deputy, I noticed something strange about him, something _old_ , even though he looked young. It’s like, time doesn’t _move_ here, or people don’t…” 

“Maybe that’s their cult. They sacrifice their own once a year for their wiggly sea-god, and it lets them live forever.” 

Sam frowns. “But it doesn’t _eat_ its victims.” 

“Maybe it doesn’t need to,” Dean says. “Maybe it just feeds on something we can’t see.” 

“Like what?”  

“Fear. Souls.” 

“Soulless people don’t die.” 

Dean kicks lightly at Sam’s ankle. “I don’t know, Sam. What the fuck, it’s monster psychology. Maybe it’s just doing it for kicks. Proving a point.” 

“You think it’s that smart?” 

“It knows the fucking _future_ , Sam.” 

“Great,” Sam rolls his eyes. “We gotta go see if it’s still there—you know that, right? The monster.” 

Dean sighs, taking a sip of his coffee. 

“What?” 

“You said the same thing last time. And then you almost drowned.” 

“Well, then,” Sam says, lightly. “We’ll just have to make sure it doesn’t happen this time.” 

 

8.

 

Waithe gets them a boat.  

Sam sucks in a sharp breath when he sees it—the dangling rows of jigging lights, the peeling red paint, and the chutes stained with old squid ink. He closes his eyes and sees the same boat in his memory. Out on the sea, lights flickering, bobbing like a toy far away in the waves. Had they been standing on the beach then, gazing out to sea? Or had they been in the water too? Things are coming back to him, in bits and pieces, and now he see Dean in his memory, standing next to him, younger, something shadowed in his eyes.  

They were not working this the way they usually did. They were closing in on the monster blind because Dad had said something, done all the talking before he died, and after that Sam and Dean couldn’t find words. Looking at his brother, wondering if he would be the one to end Sam’s life, had been horrifying in a way Sam couldn’t begin to put to words. _Not Dean,_ he’d kept thinking, although the visions were getting crazier and more frequent, and he’d felt more and more like a powder keg waiting to blow. Still: _not Dean_ , not his brother—what evil could he possibly become that it would be Dean, in the end, ridding the world of him? 

Sam remembers the knife of it: the promise of evil that he thought he could feel in his veins. Not so much now, not after everything that happened and they got beat down again and again. He’s changed his wiring and his instincts and the lines he would draw. He’s culled out his temper and forced down his nightmares and learned to live with the phantom crackling in his palms beneath which Kevin had fizzled out. But back then—all his strength, all his anger; he’d thought he was feeding the monster. And Dean…had Dean watched him closer, stubborn in his quest to save Sam from the evil he wasn’t yet?  

“Attack of the déjà vu,” Dean mutters now, making wriggly creepy-movie fingers. He yanks on foul-weather gear, but leaves the buckles unstrapped so that he looks quite like a traffic cone with arms. “You know how to sail this thing?” 

Waithe’s boatman, who had introduced himself as Tom, nods. “Weather’s going to get rough, though.” 

“Wouldn’t be like us if we didn’t do stupid things in stupid weather,” grins Dean, elbowing Sam lightly. 

“Not funny, dude,” says Sam, unhappily. 

He stands at the edge of the skiff, watching whatever sunlight can pierce through the clouds gleam off the water. Tom starts the motor. In Sam’s memory, he sees the monster again, that first time he’d gone in, the black marks it had left on his skin. He and Dean had bought the acetylene torch the next day. _No other way,_ he remembers himself saying, _we just gotta burn it out._ Dean hadn’t liked the plan, but Dean hadn’t seen the monster. Hadn’t seen what Sam had, what he now knew to be visions of their then future. 

He’d wanted that thing to die. Maybe, stupidly, he’d wished that that would undo those visions of the future, give him a clean slate unmarred by destiny. 

Behind him, the coast rapidly disappears, and right before the mist hides it entirely, he sees the two strangers again. Dressed in cheap diving suits; preparing a motor boat. 

He swallows down his unease. 

Tom steers them to the co-ordinates Sam has triangulated in less than thirty minutes.  

 “I’m going in this time,” Dean yells, over the waves and the water spraying them both.  

“Dude. That’s not what we agreed upon.” 

“What we agreed upon was bullshit,” Dean says, grabbing haphazardly at whatever scuba gear they’d got. “You fucking win at rock, paper, scissors every time.” 

“So we’ll toss a coin.” 

Dean smacks Sam’s shoulder. “Ha! I remember what you did the last time with that fucking coin. How many times have you pulled that trick on me?” 

“Yeah, because that’s what matters right now. My stupid party trick.” 

“Sam.” 

Sam grimaces. “I’m not staying here on this boat and letting you go down there.” 

“Tough luck,” Dean shouts. He makes his way over to Sam, swaying slightly with the boat. “Look, Sam—I need you up here. You—well, if this _is_ about her, you gotta be here to fight it. I have a feeling I can’t.” 

“You can’t _what_?”  

Dean pulls the goggles over his head and puts the tube in his mouth. He leans down to pull on the diving fins, and Sam kneels next to him.  

“I’m coming after you in twenty minutes,” he hisses, and gets nothing in return but an eye-roll. 

Dean looks at him, like _you’re seriously gonna trust Tom to wait here?_  

 “I’m serious, asshole. And take the fucking torch.” 

When the black water closes over his brother’s head, Sam leans against the side of the boat, feeling wrung out. Like a spell crushed into him, tore at his very atoms. He draws a breath of cold air that settles in his chest like broken ice. 

Somewhere out in the fog, he hears that motor boat. 

 

9.

 

There’s no past, no present, no future in the depths. 

Only the soft churn of waves at the surface, and the tug of currents from the bottom: a dance, interplay, and anything getting caught in between would just have to go along.  

There are a few moments underneath, when there’s just the vague menace of something ancient hiding out here and the promise of a boat waiting just above. Dean looks around, trying to ignore those initial surprise sounds of his inhalations through the regulator, the way everything looks magnified under water. He thinks of the last time—waiting out on the boat the way Sam’s waiting for him now, watching for any sign of a flare, heart in his mouth. Thinking he shouldn’t have sent Sam down there: the exploration the time before had been bad enough, and Sam had almost drowned. Thinking he shouldn’t have let Sam flip that coin. Thinking _Sam, you stupid son of a bitch._  

And Sam had _seen_ something, then: it all comes back to Dean now, with the water pushing at him and his eyes searching for the monster. Sam had seen something fucked up, something he couldn’t explain. He’d surfaced, gasping and yelling. _We should head back. Right now—Dean, we need to go._ The weird fog had come in then, warping everything, and Dean had been frozen, staring right into it.  

At lights, bobbing in the fog, at _something_ — 

But right now: writhing sea-grass, and greens like watercolour daubs. _Right now_ is where he needs to focus, where the monster is. He floats, weightless, surprised when something passes overhead like a long, white shark. Another boat, maybe.  

And then he looks back down and sees the dark rushing at him.  

He feels it pry his jaw open—can’t taste it, because there is so much of it; can’t breathe, because it rushes him, forces his lungs full with its filth, crushes into every vein and artery. It speaks like an ocean tossed by thunder, a muffled heartbeat. It sounds like gallons of saltwater through fluid and flesh and bone. And then it tastes  like nothing, speaks nothing, sounds like nothing—but he can feel it settle within him, rippling waves, tremors pushing outward from a screaming centre. His tongue goes silent. He goes blind. A warm wetness, a weighted dark, folds around him. 

This thing has been sleeping here for centuries. For aeons, even: in flashes of color, Dean sees visions of the coast, as it were.  

Nothing but sea and sand and seasons flashing in the blink of an eye; then the first signs of men. They feared the monster, hiding away when the sun went down, thankful for the sureness of sunrise every morning. The settlers who came later feared it too—saw it in their dreams, promising to walk on a world steeped in darkness. Those that took ships to this part of the sea saw it, at times, went back home agued with what locals began to call _witchcraft._ It wasn’t until the last century that something tried to hunt it down, though. Waithe and some townspeople, armed with latest technology, trying to burn it down just like him and Sam. Their monster that lives here under the sea. 

It paid them back thought, didn’t it?  

Dean feels the triumph of the monster, its sick joy. Time, and space, none of that meant anything to a creature like this. The offenders stewed in a world where they didn’t move forward in time. Once a year, the monster drove them to sacrifice one of their own. Days repeated; years. No one new moved here and stayed for too long.  

He and Sam, the first time they’d come here to hunt this thing, had no clue what they were up against. A mysterious foggy coast, some strange details about the nearest town they couldn’t really wrap their heads around, and some fucked up visions: wasn’t much to go with.  

But Sam had come down here. With his acetylene torch and his anger and his fear of the future— 

He’d been shown something, something awful. 

And now, nearly ten years later, they were back, in their squid boat, Dean holding the torch this time. He turns the valve, thinking _burn the monster,_ but where would he aim? This thing, he thinks, _is in my head._  

But also somewhere in the water, because the monster wraps a dark tentacle around his leg and yanks him up. _Bad,_ Dean thinks, struggling. Coming out of the water that quickly would be bad, he’d probably die. But the weak light’s getting stronger now, and he’s powerless, caught in the grip of this thing, and his lungs are probably going to explode the moment he hits surface. He tugs at the tubes connecting the oxy-acetylene torch to the boat, hoping Sam would notice, but it’s no good. The monster is too fast. 

 _You’re hers,_ the monster says in his head. _I won’t kill you._  

His head breaks the surface, and Dean gasps, air rushing into his lungs like a plume of flame. 

Something is wrong. 

The _world_ is wrong. 

Everything looks darker. The sky is red, and the sun looks like it is dying. Sam is nowhere to be found.  

Shadows crawl at the coasts. Dean looks around, dizzied and wild, recognizing nothing. 

This is not his _time_. 


	4. Four

10.

 

Sam gazes at the motor boat in the fog, worrying at his lip with his teeth. Ten minutes have passed; things are quiet. He resists the urge to go after Dean.   

He looks, instead, at the bright bulbs swinging from the metal skeleton of this boat, calling out to squid, gauzy in the mist. The last time they’d been here, a similar boat had floated ghostly in the sea while they yelled at it for help. Its lights had bobbed like jellyfish, drifting luminous through the smoke-screens of the Atlantic. Sam had a head-wound; he remembers being cold, wet and terrified, blood dripping into his eyes.  

He had just been dragged back into the boat by Dean. Spluttering on water, gasping for breath, yelling at Dean to get them out of here. _I don’t want to see any more,_ he’d gasped. But what—what future had the monster shown him that was worse than Lucifer, worse than the demon-blood? 

For a moment, the fog clears. Sam sees the motor-boat, clearly, the worried stranger leaning over the prow of it to stare into the water below. 

No—not _stranger_.  

“Dean?” 

Dean—ten years younger, _Dean_ —looks up and sees him too. His face isn’t clear, but his mouth moves, and Sam knows, instinctively, what he’s saying. _Sam._   

It’s like time has no meaning here. All of a sudden Sam knows—this boat, they’d glimpsed at this very boat back then. The monster under the water had shown Sam pieces of the future, had re-created the ocean in their bathroom—why would this not be possible for it? 

Sam starts when cold water starts pelting his skin. Rain.  

The water ripples. He waits, eyes peeled for Dean, and not twenty feet and ten years away, Dean does too. _I remember waiting in a storm_. 

A storm. 

“Fuck.” 

Across the distance, Dean’s pinging something with his torchlight. He looks halfway freaked out of his mind, his eyes darting between the dark water and the darkening sky. His torch asks, hesitantly, in Morse: _S-A-M?_  

Cas told them every time they went backwards in time that nothing would change, even if they tried to make it. Things would, somehow, eventually, loop around to the same outcome. But standing here, looking at this younger version of his brother, it’s difficult to not shout out warnings. Would Dean have still gone ahead with his deal to resurrect Sam had he known all the dominos that decision would let fall? 

 _Yes,_ Sam thinks, looking for his own torch. He’d probably do exactly the same things. So would Sam. Their big plans and contingencies finally came down to things as simple as a game of Snake and Ladder. You either climb, or you get eaten. Time and fate and universe roll the dice. No premonitions, no messengers from the future would really matter with that kinda bottom line. 

He wasn’t going to change a thing by shouting at Dean through the storm to just let him die in Cold Oak. 

It’s been twenty minutes. Twenty minutes since Dean went down there. Twenty minutes and ten years since _Sam_ did, over by that boat. And now the rain’s coming down in earnest, lightning striking the coast. Had Dean waited this long, last time? Had they communicated like this, across time? What had Sam told him? 

And now Dean looks worriedly over the edge of the boat. His windbreaker flaps in the wind. He checks his watch, and so does Sam. _Twenty minutes._  

Ten years ago, Dean hadn’t given Sam half an hour in the water. He’d dragged Sam out of there twenty minutes in. Why was he not moving? 

Sam begins to pull on his own diving gear, hurriedly. He has to go after Dean. 

 

11.

 

Sam remembers being angry.  

Under the water, with the monster swimming somewhere unseen and close, he remembers being angry at the visions that the monster had shown him. Destiny, or bad choices: whatever it would be, it felt like something _concrete_. Something that he couldn’t escape by his will alone. What he _could_ do, was kill this thing.  

Everything looks magnified under water. Vision changes, warps the vista. In diving classes, they tell you to touch the walls of the pool and other things around you, to get you used to it. Underneath, you’re not really supposed to touch anything, because this isn’t your world. This green land of drifting seaweed and luminous water is something alien, something to observe. 

That Sam of ten years ago, he’s somewhere down here too, but he’s not of Sam’s world right now. That time is only observable. _Dean_ is part of his world.  

Only—where is Dean? 

Fucking _great_ , Sam thinks, looking around frantically. The regulator sounds too loud to him. The light too bright. Somehow, everything starts taking on a menacing look when you can’t find what you’re looking for. 

And then he sees something. Another light. Another person. 

 _Dean,_ Sam thinks, swimming towards him, and then _no._  

Not Dean.  

This screwed up monster is showing him _himself_ , younger Sam, and now their eyes meet, and it’s worse than seeing Dean up above. Younger Sam’s eyes go wide behind his mask. He stops moving completely, and just stares. He probably thinks Sam’s a vision, what he’ll grow up to be, and he isn’t really wrong, is he? Sam wishes he could _show_ him, everything that he becomes. Like a warning.  

A _warning._ Fuck. He’s not the monster here. 

Except, _maybe,_ he might just be misconstrued as one. Is this what he’d seen, ten years ago? Something that looked just like himself, something that he thought was a vision?  

There’s a change then, a rumble, a perceptible shift in the water temperature.   

Sam sees everything like daguerreotype stills—his younger version frozen, staring, at something behind him; the flotilla of bubbles turning his vision into slices of photospheric brilliance; Dean, behind him. 

Only—which Dean?  This thing probably got the real Dean. _This_ Dean looks like the Dean of the year before. The Dean who chased Sam around the bunker with a hammer. His eyes are dark and he blazes, strangely, standing out against the dark of the ocean.  

Something shimmers in his grasp: a knife. 

And suddenly, Sam _remembers._  

( _I saw me, Dean. And you. You know what Dad said? That you might have to kill me? I just saw you do it. I was something else. I—_ ) 

And Dean, spluttering, indignant, had turned the motorboat around.  

( _I’m never going to hurt you, Sam.)_  

But he was wrong. It’s _Dean_ who’s lost to the Darkness this time, Dean who has more or less been acting like he expects this to happen. And now here’s Dean, or some version of him, set to follow a preset algorithm put inside of him like a virus. Here’s Dean, and here’s a knife, and Sam too shell-shocked to do anything. 

He still has the canister of oxygen. He struggles to grab hold of it, the weird buoyancy of the water working against him. By the time he gets hold of it, something else grabs it, a shot of something dark from deeper in the sea. It falls away, and he sees it do a ricochet in mid-trajectory, fly straight at Younger Sam. He tries to get out of the way, but Sam knows it’s gonna slam into him, make a cut, that at least for some moments he’s going to be inconvenienced.  

It’s strange how Sam actually doesn’t care. This is a strange level of dissociation, not being concerned about your own past self, but _who_ is that person anyway? He’s young, and angry, and he’s going to make bad choices. He’s going to end up in Hell. He’s going to burn, and he’s going to drown, and he’s going to let a lot of things out of holes where they’d been put into for a reason. He’s going to be an asshole, and he’s also going to be a hero, and more than anything, he’s going to stay Dean’s brother. 

And somehow, somewhere, he’s going to turn into Sam. Who needs Dean and his stupid fatalistic attitude to remind himself why he cares. What he cares for. Without Dean, the bumper sticker of _saving people, hunting things_ might as well be the line for a Byzantine canto that no one understands. 

Odd. Sam has, in some dark moments, thought about what he would have done if he could have gone back and fixed his mistakes. What he would have told that kid of ten years ago. All he wants to say now is _get back into the fucking boat._ Let it all happen the way it did.  

In the end, you just try to do everything you can to move forward, and hope that’s enough to get you through. And you try to keep the people who you love while you do what you got to. 

Maybe all Sam really wants to tell that kid is: _I’m sorry._  

It’s just him against this monster who looks like his brother. Or the brother who’s wearing the guise of a monster. There’s a thin line between the two, somewhere, and a whole lot of fucked-up history to thank for it. It’s all about the context in this game.  

He looks down at his arms and there’s dark creeping over his veins, visible even in the ghost-light of the subsurface. Long, black marks like the grooves in the seashells. The skin of the victims.  

Younger Sam, blood swimming away from his forehead in tendrils now, is gaping at him. He probably thinks Sam’s turning into something evil. (Fuck it, he probably _is._ ) 

He’s not sure why he never made that connection: The Darkness is strong with this creature. It’s a cousin, or a creation, or maybe it’s just a little piece of Amara that didn’t make it to the whole. Sam knows how some things can be in pieces and still work as a person, or a creature, or whatever she was. 

Or maybe this is a vision, too, one that he’s living right now.  

Dean’s hand comes up to rest against Sam’s heart, heavy and hot. Sam puts his own hand on top of it and can feel his heart beat, rhythmic and even, everything that is right and ordinary with this world.  

Sam thinks, _you can’t wear his face and get away with it._ The thought becomes rage; too many times in the last year he’s looked at Dean and seen something else looking back, and they paid a large price so Sam didn’t have to anymore. _And now, once again_ , _here’s something wearing_ his _face._  

Dean smiles and presses a finger to his lips, like _sshh, this is a secret, you can’t tell anyone else._  

Dean’s knife doesn’t cut him. It cuts his oxygen.  

Water floods the tube. 

Sam yanks the mask off his face, remembers to not breathe in. He goes for the surface, but the monster drags him back down. (Or maybe it’s Dean, it’s hard to tell the difference.) He swims for the gas canister instead, and the monster follows him. They’re stuck in a dance, and this same thing would be violent back on land, only down here it’s kind of beautiful. Or maybe Sam’s starting to feel the lack of oxygen. 

Dean’s foot kicks out and connects with Sam’s ribs just as he grabs hold of the gas. He exhales, and suddenly there’s water rushing up, down, drowning him. He coughs and more water rushes to fill his lungs, and he sees, for a moment, his own self ten years younger, watching. 

 _(I was something else. And I burned.)_  

Sam knows what he has to do. 

He chokes. He lights the torch. 

He feels the heat, the sparking of the two gases, and he closes his eyes. 

White fire erupts around him. 

 

12.

 

Dean stands at the water line, looking at the ocean. The sky is red above him, and the sun is gone. Long ago, when he and Sam had first come after this creature, they’d driven right into fog. Thick, and dark, and even then, Dean had felt drawn to it.  

When they came out of it, they were oddly clear on what to do next. _Get out of this place._  

It’s strange. Being a Winchester, things start looking like they’re always surmountable. There’s no price they wouldn’t pay, in the end, to triumph over the demons, or the Devil, or the angels, or a millennia-old curse. There’s no price they wouldn’t pay to triumph over the Darkness, when it came to it. 

To _leave_ somewhere, without completing a job, then: that wasn’t them. Something had told them to leave, and they had listened. They’d forgotten this place, because someone had _made_ them. 

And now Dean stands at the shore, watching the red sea come in, and wonders if it was _her_. The Darkness, roiling across time and space, pushing them away from this case that could kill them. Or it was just her lackey monster, who knew they’d do this in the future—let its mistress out, let her walk the earth, let her _take_ the earth. The monster who had spared them back then so they could do it this favor in their future. 

It didn’t need them anymore. At least—it didn’t need Sam anymore. 

Dean’s not sure what to make of that. What that makes _him_. 

He isn’t even fucking sure what _year_ this is. There’s no internet. There’s no Sam, either, maybe hasn’t been for a while.  

He feels it in his bones. 

He needs Sam. He doesn’t care as much without Sam—can’t get anybody to care without him. 

He goes back to the cabin, and finds Sam’s research gathering dust on the table, his phone still plugged into the charger where he’d left it back when, his laptop still closed and on the table. He stands in that quiet, suddenly cathedral-like space, and thinks of what Sam said he saw, long back.  

 _(I saw me, Dean. And you. You know what Dad said? That you might have to kill me? I just saw you do it. I was something else. And I burned.)_  

In _this_ time, Dean had managed to swim back to shore. The shore he didn’t dare leave, because God knows what time he’ll step into if he goes out of the sphere of the monster’s influence. He can guess what’s going on, though. Amara’s winning. The world is in the thrall of the Darkness. And without Sam, Dean doesn’t think he can even hope to go against her. 

In the sea, there’s no monster. It burned: he knows that much. Dean went down and the monster threw him into some time he didn’t know. And Sam probably went after him and got the monster.  

The _idiot_ , Dean thinks, and the world feels like it is closing in on him, ready to crush him. Sam hadn’t liked this case from the start. And this case had sunk its teeth in him, dragged him away, because he wasn’t important to Amara’s grand plan in whatever stupid, awful way Dean was. 

He can’t get to Castiel.  

He can’t get to _anyone._   

And so he waits by the shore. 

 

13.

Dean feels it when it happens, like a frisson under his skin. 

He turns and begins running, towards the old church, towards where his other self stands, gaping at him. The Other Dean has a gun, pointed at him. The Other Dean has just touched the stone tablet, is just seeing this vision of a world steeped in Darkness. It hasn’t happened yet in _his_ time. Sam’s still alive in _his_ time. 

Alive and watching a fucking documentary somewhere, away from this place. 

“Look out!” Dean shouts, and the Other Dean turns, the barrel of his gun slamming hard into the skull of the guy who’s been creeping up behind him. The guy drops. Other Dean kicks him lightly to check if he’s conscious, and the man’s head lolls on his shoulder. Okay, then. 

“This better be good,” Other Dean says, immediately turning the gun back at Dean. “What is this, is this some kinda—,” he scrunches up his face, thinking hard, “uh—” 

“I can’t remember that movie, either, the one you’re trying to remember,” says Dean. “Though, if you wanted a point of reference, you’d probably refer to Season Apocalypse. You know—when Zachariah sent you tumbling through to the future where Palin was President and it was Z-Nation on the streets.” 

Other Dean’s eyebrows arch. He doesn’t lower the gun. Smart. 

“Who are you?” 

Dean swallows, hard. “Past self, meet future self.” 

“You’re me, in the future.” 

“Don’t sound so incredulous. Do I have to talk about Rhonda Hurley’s panties again?” 

Other Dean blinks. Something seems to go crashing inside him, a sense of comprehension maybe. He looks around.  

“I don’t—what is this place? Where’s Sam?” 

Dean says, in an exhale, “Earth, post Darkness.” 

“She wins?” 

There’s not even any inflection. He’s not surprised, which he feels should be a strange thing, but his emotions about the Darkness really are sort of like a free-spinning radio dial.  Dean looks at the red sea and the red sky, and wonders how he got to be this, this person who’s halfway sure that he’s fighting a losing battle already. _You have Sam,_ he wants to scream at this Dean. Funny how things always seem terrible and then they get worse.  

“Not if you can help it,” he says. “You need to leave this place.” 

Other Dean scoffs. “Yeah, okay.” 

“I know what you’re thinking. That I’m probably something the monster conjured up, to get you to leave. That I’m the _same thing_ that got you to leave the last time. That scaring you by showing you a world where Amara _wins_ is the best thing an enemy would do to get you to leave it alone. But dude—you don’t want to end up in this place, in this time,” Dean says. He hopes he sounds desperate. He _feels_ desperate. Should he throw his hands out to look desperate? That’s more of a Sam move, “This is _not_ the weirdest rodeo you’ve ever seen, Dean. This doesn’t even come close.” 

“We can’t _leave,_ just like that. This monster, it screws up people—” 

“A very small set of people, who have relatively more or less figured out how they’re going to deal with it. Look, Dean—I’m gonna tell you this in the language I know we understand. You stay here, _this_ happens. You stay here, that thing in the sea takes you for a merry little ride, and drops you in _this_ time, where you’re powerless to do _anything_ to stop Amara.”  

Other Dean shakes his head. He’s probably thinking, _this can’t be the reason we lose. Not this case, in this stupid coast. This can’t be how we lose against her_. 

They’re human. They’re vulnerable to the fallacy that bigger things won’t fall down all around them, crush them beneath, and _that_ would be that. This is not a plot. This is not a contrivance, a bucket in a narrative to tick off while they move towards the big resolution.  

This is them being human, and dying, and the world continuing to turn on. 

There’s only one language to get to Dean. 

“Look. You don’t get out of here, he’s gonna die.” 

Other Dean splutters. “This is—what, this is about Sam now?” 

Dean rolls his eyes. “Everything’s about Sam. In one way or the other. That’s how we work.” 

Other Dean looks around, like he expects future Sam to be hiding behind a rock or something. “I don’t—” 

“I’ll break it down for you. You go in there, looking for the monster,” he points at the red sea. “It throws you _here_ , in this time. He goes after you, and he gets the monster, but it gets him too. Okay?” 

Dean’s surprised at how calm he sounds. Maybe _empty_ is a better word.  

(Is that where Sam is—the Empty?) 

“You don’t get out of here, Sam’s gonna burn up down there in the ocean. You know how fucked up that sounds?” 

He looks away then, and at the moon. It hangs helpless in a miasma of light pollution, tiny tonight, revolving at a cold and lonely perigee from the Earth. The ends of the horizon are going dark, in weird pixel blocks. 

“You can’t get him back. If he goes, this time, you will never get him back.” 

 Dean looks back, and Other Dean nods, quickly, his eyes still quizzical. 

The guy he’s knocked out has a bat, and he sneaks up behind him. Dean doesn’t warn him. 

 “We need Sam,” he says, instead. “She’s going to win without him.” 

The bat rises.  

Bits of the ocean disappear. And the land. The Other Dean disappears as well, sucked back into his time, or gobbled up by whatever is erasing this landscape. His own legs disappear, and then his hands.  

Dean’s not startled. He just stands there for an interminable time, feeling like a man on the plank, pirates at his back and ocean in front. There’s an odd, ineffable feeling in him.  

It feels like— 

 

14.

 

—waking up. 

He screams for Sam. There’s no answer. Most often than not, based on a screwed up scale of probability, he screams for Sam and there’s no answer, and a clusterfuck follows. 

He’s in the cabin. His head hurts. Someone probably took a bat to it. 

His throat burns. Something scrapes in his windpipes like August dust. He thinks momentarily of the road running like paint and his eyes full of grit, low hills and cows and UFO ramblings on the radio. He thinks momentarily of the sun streaming through Sam’s hair, and the ghostly afterglow of gas stations.  

Safety. 

 _You have to get out of this place._  

“Sam?” he shouts. “Sammy?” 

“Dean?”  

Sam sounds scared. He’s yelling, throwing open doors.  

“ _DEAN!”_  

“We gotta go,” Dean says, the moment he locates Sam. The relief is indescribable. Dean stands there with his skin tingling. His fingertips feel alit with possibility. He feels an urge deep inside of him, an ache, and it starts with his teeth and crawls all the way down his spine. Something stirs in his heart, tar-like, an unholy creature. He grabs hold of Sam’s shoulder, and squeezes hard. 

“Ow. What the fuck, Dean.” 

“You’re here.” 

Sam gapes at him. “Dude, what— the deputy of Silent Hill told me they’d found you in a church or something—did they hurt you?” 

 “Get your stuff. We’re getting out of here. Now.” 

“Oh God, Dean, do you have a concussion?”  

“Never mind about that. We have to go.” 

“What’d you mean we have to go? Go where?” 

“Back to Lebanon,” Dean says. “Or somewhere. Next case. I don’t know. You pick. We _have_ to go, Sam. We’re in danger here.” 

The sky is grey outside. It has a pre-dawn composition, which is funny, because it should be gunning for four pm brightness right now. Thunderheads roll over, limned with gold. At least everything isn’t ash-grey, the way it was in the Future.  

The Dean in the future had worn the dark well. It was hard to explain it, but somehow, it had fit him. And maybe that was why he’d insisted that they needed Sam. Sam wouldn’t let it come to that, wouldn’t let Dean _be_ that. 

Sam complains, a _lot._ But he grabs his stuff, pulled along by whatever madness he sees in Dean’s face. They walk all the way to the car, and Sam demands, and then he yells, and then he wheedles. He asks a ton of questions, none of which Dean answers, so he settles for sulking instead.  

“Did you see something? A vision?” 

“I promise I’ll tell you everything,” says Dean, exasperated. “Now _please,_ Sammy, seriously.” 

The Impala shines except for a spray of mud along her side. It’s shaped like a starling. Dean’s happy to just _see_ her. Sam dumps his stuff on the ground next to the Impala, and folds his arms. 

“Okay. What’s this about?” 

“Get in the car, Sam.” 

“ _No_. Tell me what’s going on.” 

“I will. Can we _please_ get out of here, first? This beach gives me the heebie-jeebies.” 

“It _what?_ ” 

“Sam. Please.” 

“But the monster—what about—?” 

“Hear me out. Then if you think you wanna come back, we’ll come back. Okay?” 

“Okay,” Sam says. He looks at Dean with suspicion, but there must be something he sees, something that propels him into the car. “Okay, fine. You’re acting weird.” 

He puts the car into gear, and tries to give Sam what he thinks is a reassuring smile. Sam just looks halfway pissed and halfway concerned. 

“Sky’s blue,” Dean murmurs. Sam makes a strangled sound at that. Dean reaches out to pat his shoulder, just to make sure he’s there.  

“You’re acting _really_ weird right now,” says Sam. But he slumps in his seat, thumbs his phone, and settles in for the drive. 

And Dean drives. When they get to the curve in the road from where they can see the beach, he slows. The two strangers from the beach, they’re by the shore. Preparing a motor boat. 

“I was just thinking,” says Sam, following his gaze. “Do they look familiar to you?” 

“No,” Dean says. “They’re no one. No one at all.” 

 

-fin


End file.
